


Dragonhide

by RhineGold



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Blood, Cages, Cutting, F/M, Snow Dark - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-02
Updated: 2015-11-02
Packaged: 2018-04-29 13:06:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5128712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RhineGold/pseuds/RhineGold
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Series AU -  Regina’s spell fails and there is no Storybrooke. Charming is dead and a monster remains in a cage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Fruit

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Baxtersaurus. If this needs more notes or warnings, let me know.

This space is dark and filthy and not fit for a queen, especially one once so shining and still so fair. He lounges in the floor of his tiny, narrow cage, head cocked to the side, hands draped loosely across his knees. She is seated on the low wooden stool just to the side of the bars, within arms reach if either of them wanted it. He wants it, but she ignores him.

He watches her fingers peeling cleverly into the orange they hold, flitting around the rind, peeling it back smoothly with no breakages and no tearing. Soon she has a perfect orange rind, still round and whole-looking, and the pulpy wedges are free to be devoured. Once he had laughed at her choice of fruit, wondering aloud why she no longer preferred a nice, juicy apple. It had taken days for his tongue to grow back and he would not make that same mistake again.

Ignoring the knife stuck into the leg of the chair, she picks apart the wedges with her fingers, too. He can hear the squelch of moisture as she separates the pulpy bits, and the scent is intoxicating when mixed with the soft scent of lilies that always seems to follow her no matter where she goes. He regrets not having seen her in her glass coffin, surrounded by the flowers of birth and of death, but in a way, he supposes he is seeing it still.

The Shepard is dead and he is not coming back, gone now to lie with his brother and his pitiful mother. The baby is gone, gone like his own precious child, lost alone in a world without magic, destined to be the savior of a village that will never be. And Regina is dead. He had known the instant it happened, smelt the blood and the magic and the ENDING of that which he had worked so long and so hard to achieve. Without Regina, the Curse had crumbled. Without Regina, a heart had turned black.

“Lips as red as rubies…” He murmurs, his voice soft and sibilant in the quiet. “Hair as black as night… Skin as white as snow… Now, dearie, how about a bite?”

Her eyes flicker to his but she does not move her head. Finally, after a long moment, he rolls his head even further to the side, his mouth drawing back in a hideous grin that once would have chilled her to the bone. Instead, she smiles faintly, peeling a piece free and dangling it from her fingers just outside the bar.

When he lifts his fingers, she jerks hers away, and he glances up at her, knowing exactly what she wants. Clutching the bars in each hand, he pulls himself up to kneel there. Pressing his face between the cool, slick metal of his prison, he twists his neck until his chin juts out. His tongue curls then, long and inhumanely prehensile, the tip of it tasting the sweet slick of the orange, sweetened further still by the pads of her fingers and the flavor that is hers alone.

In a lightening bolt of movement, she is standing. The orange wedge drops between them into the dirt and he hisses, a pained sound that crests into a wild laugh as she sinks the knife into the corner of his mouth.

Still laughing, he curls his tongue now against the blade, worrying the flat of it and teasing at the edge. Eyes narrowing, she presses harder, the tip slicing deep and hot into the side of his cheek, the edge spreading his lip beyond the constrains of the corner, slicing him open.

He reaches for her then, one hand on her hip through the bars, squeezing at her tunic, smearing the blood that is falling fast and hot around them. Already the wound is trying to worry shut, biting again and again into the edge of the knife. He clucks at her like a bemused schoolteacher, his tongue slipping free to just brush the edges of her fingers where they grip the knife.

“One day, I will find a way to hurt you,” She whispers, voice steady in a way that delights him more than it frightens.

“Of course, dearie…” He murmurs, pulling her tunic closer to smell against the scent of lilies and of HER. “I do so love to see you try…”

She smiles then, a ghost of her former self, and the knife withdraws.

He licks his lips and lets the blood run down his face, hot on his neck, nearly steaming against the dirt floor.

“One day, you will look at me and all of that amusement will be banished from your face,” She warns, not bothering to sound threatening, instead making it seem as mundane and absolute as a comment on the weather.

“Promises, promises~” He sings out, curling back into the floor until he is lying on the dirt in a splatter of his own blood.

Sneering, Snow White turns and walks away, leaving the knife just out of reach, slammed deep into the wooden stool. When he hears the doors at the end of the hall seal shut, Rumpelstiltskin gives a little giggle of amusement. Rolling onto one hip, he scoops up the bloody, dirty wedge of orange left on the floor of his cell and places it in his mouth. It tastes of lilies and death.


	2. Knife

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rumpelstiltskin is on the ceiling again. It is not a good day.

A month passes before she returns to see him. Rumpelstiltskin is on the ceiling again.

He has draped his arms and legs through the bars of the roof of his cage, his face pressed against a cool bit of stone where water trickles ever-so-slowly down a stalagmite. With his mouth open and eyes closed, he looks relaxed, limp, and dead. 

His eyes snap open, bright and shimmering in the torchlight as she reaches for the door. The bolt sliding free is a thunderclap and he slithers down the back wall to crouch in the far corner. “Well, well~” He sings out, baring his teeth in one of his hysterically shrill laughs. “Come for a bit of sport, dearie?”

She wipes the amusement off of his face when she brushes aside her cloak. He is against the door now, unable to push it open due to the magical constraints of his prison, instead clutching at it. His clawed fingers whiten against the slick bars and he sucks in a breath like a man about to drown.

A slight smile drags at her lips as she slips the dagger free of her belt, holding it aloft.

“…Where did you …get …that…?” He drawls, voice sounding almost languid, almost bemused, in complete contrast with the hitch of his shoulders and the expression on his face. Those cat’s eyes are enormous now, pupils merely slits, and the smile has fallen from his lips at last.

She ignores his query; instead, she reads the name engraved on the blade. He closes his eyes and she can feel the change then, snapping through her body and bones, as he tenses and snarls. He rattles the door, making it bang on its hinges as he screams and snarls unintelligible things. A trickle of blood appears on his forehead as he smashes his face against the cruel cage, but the wound is gone before his tantrum ends.

This time, she vows, things will be different.

“You’re mine, now, Rumpelstiltskin,” Snow White whispers softly. Her voice is rough, dragging his name like a lame man’s leg, and he stills then, staring at her.

“What do you want?” He asks cautiously, his voice dropping down into something almost human.

He is not human; she reminds herself as she slams open the door, ripping it from his clenched fingers. He wavers on the edge of the barrier, teeth curling back in a flare of pain.

“On your knees,” She snaps, shoving his tattered, oily coat with her empty hand.

He is on the ground in an instant, staring up at her with his usual mirth-filled expression. “So it’s this game, is it, dearie?” He sings out, and she slaps him, hard, with the flat of the dagger.

The slash of blood darkens his cheek and they both look surprised when it does not begin to close immediately.

Snow White’s smile curls into something far more sinister, and for the first time in a hundred years, Rumpelstiltskin feels a coil of fear.


	3. Dragons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once she preferred apples. Those days are gone.

Once upon a time, she preferred apples. Their flesh as soft and smooth as her own, their juices as sweet as she imagined love would be. Her father brought her fruits and treats from the far corners of the earth, but it was their own local apple that she had come to love so much. Ironic now that the taste she had so come to associate with happiness, love, and home, had been introduced to her by the woman who had taken all those things away.

But she had not acted alone.

Oh, no. All of her maliciousness, her cruelty, and her grand design, had been the architecture of another entirely. Regina had not created her dark curse alone - she had not the power for such evil, despite all her darkness and desires. But power, like love, was a transient thing, slippery, often lost or left behind. Or buried in the woods beneath a withering, ancient tree, slowly poisoning the ground as its counterpart had poisoned her world.

Snow White no longer touched apples.

Oranges, instead, had become her staple fruit. The orange - sweet, sharp, and wet; wrapped in a thickened hide that safeguarded the soft, juicy pulp. Once peeled, orange rinds were soft and supple. She knew some women who rubbed them on their hands for beauty and longevity. The skin beneath her fingers now was rough, coarse, almost scaly. Her husband had once slain a dragon. She had touched the scales that had been carefully preserved, a hunting trophy and a derelict relic of an age that now seemed over.

And so she would slay her own dragon. In her own way.

It was often said that the first cut is the deepest, but her’s is shallow. Experimental. Blood wells up, as red as any man’s, but this is not a man. She can scarcely believe it ever was, even though she’s seen it looking far more civilized, clean and fancy, dressed to the nines in a house of purloined wealth. But she has seen him in the moonlight, watched the reflection bounce from water to skin to water, and she would see more still.

It is dark here, and floor is filthy. Her dragon is spread before her, arms up above his head, pressed tightly to the packed earth. He has no choice in the matter and she finds she likes this - the way he must respond to her commands. The knife is hot in her hands, being warmed by his skin, by his blood, as she recovers her initial incision, pressing harder, deeper.

Blood is welling up over that pale, mottled chest, and he hisses then, a sound like a snake retreating into its hole. But there is no retreat here, and there will be no surrender. They both know each other well enough for that much.

Reaching down, she runs one finger lightly over the cut, making him twist beneath her. He is laughing now, hoarse and hysterical, face twisted into something too grim to be a smile, but too joyful to be despair. She turns her hand, letting her nails find the fold of skin, picking at the edge of it. It is not a clean cut - the dagger’s wicked serrations make it hard to control precisely, but it is better this way.

There is nothing in her chest now but detached fascination as she curves her nails under the edge of that skin. He lets out a sound - chimera between pain and amusement - as she begins to peel the skin to the side. Using the knife, she traces a line at an angle from her first cut, lightly skimming under and pulling the flap she holds until she has revealed a section of muscle. Is that a bone she can see already? Ribs, perhaps. The flesh beneath is as thick and golden as the rest of him - muscles of a tough, compact material, and soft, fatty tissue like the gristle left on a piece of cooked meat.

Before she has realized what she is doing, she is leaning her face down, closer and closer to her work, until she can smell the blood and the fat and the bones, until she can taste it in her mouth. Her tongue steals out at last, and she tastes the exposed muscle. He goes still underneath her, eyes tightly closed. His chest rises and falls beneath her. With each sharp breath, the knife kisses him, cutting deeper each time.

“She wanted to eat my heart, you know?” She whispers suddenly, her voice nearly lost in his skin as she runs her tongue up the twist of muscle, until she hits intact skin again. The firm, leathery flesh, like that of her oranges, hiding something soft and wet and utterly consumable within. “I’ve heard she could crush hearts in her bare fist, but she wanted to eat mine…”

Sliding the knife to the left side of his chest now, she begins applying pressure, slowly, steadily, boring straight down. The Blue Fairy has warned her against killing him with the dagger - to do so would be to inherit his curse and all that entails. Immortality is not what she is after.

“Do you have a heart, Rumpelstiltskin?” She murmurs softly, petting her fingers into the exposed musculature as she continues to spear his shoulder with his own knife. The fingers twist downwards, nails gripping deeper until she can feel a bone in her fist. “Answer.”

“…Y… Yes…” He grits out, and she realizes his voice is tight, not with fear or pain, but with anger.

“I suppose we’ll find out, won’t we?” It only takes a flick of her wrist to flay his shoulder raw. Immortality is not what she is after. It is revenge.


End file.
